


(if there is a next time) meet me in my dreams

by crinkledpages



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: (Kind of) Forbidden Love, 1950s Manchuria, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Post World War II, German Soldier!Yangyang, M/M, Nazi themes/emblems/symbolism throughout, Resistance Fighter!Kunhang, Reverse World War II, Semi-Magical Realism/Magical Realism themes, The Man in the High Castle AU, Use of Nazi Greetings/Related Language/Racist Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:46:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28982823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinkledpages/pseuds/crinkledpages
Summary: It's 1950. The Germans and Japanese have won the war. Yangyang is the promising Reich captain, and Kunhang is the Manchurian Resistance fighter who's fighting a losing battle between his duty and his heart.Or: The Man in the High Castle AU.
Relationships: Liu Yang Yang/Wong Kun Hang | Hendery
Comments: 1
Kudos: 22
Collections: Challenge #4 — Awaken The World





	(if there is a next time) meet me in my dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by RINI's 'Meet Me in Amsterdam' ~

Street lamps plastered with the Nazi swastika, so worn that they hang by shredded threads. When it rains, the black paint drips like bloody black tears down the pole. 

_Sieg Heils_ interspersed with _Konnichiwas_. Frightening, when Kunhang stops and considers how bowing and saluting have become second nature to not just him, but to everyone.

Winter wears itself well in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Grey skies canopying grey buildings over battered, greyed souls. 

Kunhang wipes the damp strands of his hair back from his forehead, smashing a beanie over his head to ward off the light rain. 

German military jeeps lining the street on both sides slip into view, and underneath all that hatred, he can’t lie about the pang of relief that sprouts at seeing the towering Reich embassy amidst Japanese soil.

The Reich embassy is this exactly: A rectilinear steel fortress, a monstrosity of a black granite pavilion flanked by sleek icy white columns that branch upwards into symmetrical imposing spires. 

A small troop of Japanese soldiers patrol the alleys just behind, guns leaning against the shoulders, eyes attuned to any movement, especially if someone - someone like him - makes a mad dash towards the embassy. 

He can hear his heartbeat pumping at a mile a minute in his ears when he passes the alley. So close. _He’s so close_.

He reaches the gate - finally - icy fingers fumbling clumsily for the diplomatic pass. There’s always this residual fear - that one day they’ll actually reject his pass. 

But the guards merely signal to each other, waving impatiently to open the gates. He thinks he reads the German word for spy on their lips, but his German’s nowhere near fluent to be sure. 

In the open marching grounds, the chilly wind digs an even harsher slice into his face. He hurries to keep pace with the guard, trying his best to ignore the ogling stares as he passes, hungry for blood. 

His hand slips into his jacket pocket, thumbing the shiny gold cigarette case embossed with initials of a name that’s become his own. _H.W._

Yangyang’s assigned room for when he’s in the city is in the upper towers in the north wing at the far end of the corridor - secluded enough to afford him the privacy that befits a high-ranking SS officer. Kunhang’s legs turn to jelly each time his traitorous feet approach these great green doors, and it’s a rinse and repeat of guilt, the greedy grip for survival, and bone-chilling fear. 

“Obergruppenführer Ryu,” the officer knocks once and puts his thin mouth to the door. “Herr Wong to see you.”

“Enter.”

Yangyang is still in a state of half-undress: long white dress shirt hanging to mid-thigh, beige socks pulled all the way up, fitting snugly around his calves. Hunter green jacket tossed over his shoulders, like a half-hearted attempt at dignity. Kunhang sees the officer trying in vain to look anywhere but at his naked legs. 

“Thank you, Sturmbannführer. Close the door on your way out, please.”

“Sieg Heil!” He salutes, right arm outstretched, back straight and heels clicked together. Then he turns abruptly, face still flaming red when he closes the door with a soft click.

Yangyang smirks as he pours a glass of whiskey for himself. “Smoke?”

Kunhang flaps his hands out. “No, thank you.”

“It’s only ten. In a rush to share something?”

Yangyang glides to his bed, sliding over the sheets with enviable grace, one hand artfully balancing the glass. He pulls the jacket off, tossing it to the floor. The military medals sewn into his lapels tinkle when it hits the ground. 

“There’s been talk of a new film. You must have heard of that, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you tell me, and we’ll see who’s the more well-informed?”

It stings a little, how Yangyang sometimes treats his information like a little game between them. Maybe it’s because he actually wants to be useful to Yangyang. Needs Yangyang to realise it.

He’s certainly so much more capable than Kunhang, though. Senior group captain at the mere age of twenty-one. Kunhang had been starving and running for his life since he was ten. Damn them all. 

“Where did you go? I lost you for a minute there.”

“Nothing. Just. Thinking.”

“Thinking?” Yangyang tuts teasingly, beckoning Kunhang closer. “That can be dangerous, out here.”

Kunhang takes one quivering step forward. Yangyang lowers his chin and closes his eyes meaningfully. _Closer_. Kunhang does, hands clasped together in front of him, a deer at the mouth of a lion’s den. 

“It’s dangerous only if you’re not thinking two steps ahead of the next person.”

Yangyang throws his head back to laugh. “Hilarious. That’s part of why I keep you around, Kunhang. And are you? Two steps ahead of me, that is.” 

The boy-captain throws a restless leg over the grey sheets, mid-morning sun dappling in odd places on his pale skin, painting him in an aureole. 

Kunhang ignores the strange knot building in his stomach. “The New York Reich will be in town next week, won’t they?”

“I ask the questions, not you.” Yangyang retorts lightly. “The film. Spit it out.”

Kunhang’s jaw tightens. “The Resistance is supposed to meet their contact tomorrow night at eleven. Under the bridge off the Mukden railway.”

“How sure are you?”

Kunhang raises his eyebrows. “About...ninety-five per cent sure.”

Yangyang snorts. Mousy brown hair framing his face, eyes holding a spark of intelligence that speaks of a life that’s been harder than his years. A spark that can't be dimmed, no matter how he tries to play it off with a twinkle of youth and mischief. 

“Your Resistance is probably lying. You’ve never given me such solid information before. They’re testing you.”

Kunhang flares at that. “I’ve been careful -”

Yangyang strokes his cheek almost patronisingly. 

“They’re not stupid. They lost it the first time around, thanks to you, even though they don’t know that it was you. Chances are they’ve started looking within their ranks for a traitor, testing everyone one by one. It’s what I would do.”

Kunhang bites his lip, the roiling indignant storm quieted at his sensibility. 

“So what will you do? Pretend to fail? The New York Reich doesn’t like that the Pacific States Reich intelligence here has been growing stronger. If they present the film in Berlin themselves, they’ll be honoured. They’ll be given authority to head the embassy not just here in the Northeast, but in Greater China.”

He realises that he sounds like he cares. 

Yangyang cocks his head. “Been following Reich politics now, have you?”

“Word gets around.” Kunhang shrugs. 

He proffers the glass to Kunhang. “Tell me. Resistance gossip is often juicier than ours. I want to know what they say about me.”

Kunhang shakes his head. He takes the glass but doesn’t drink it, walks to Yangyang’s desk to refill it instead, crossing the tiny distance back to the bed to put the glass in his hand. 

Yangyang nods his head in thanks, a glimmer of something more than tolerance flickering when their eyes meet. Their hands touch briefly when he passes the glass over, and Kunhang feels a shiver course up his arm. 

“You tread on thin ice, Kunhang,” he drawls as he downs the amber liquid in a single gulp. “You don’t really have anything to gain from betraying your people. Do you?”

Yangyang is not Aryan, not by any stretch of any imagination, but Kunhang’s heard that he was born in those birthing homes that housed the next generation of the SS, the Führer’s best and brightest.

His mother had obviously hailed from the Orient; the Chinese in him shone through so starkly, despite how much the Reich heavily insisted that Japanese royalty ran in his veins. Kunhang isn’t blind. 

But bastard child of the Chrysanthemum throne or not, he’s half-German, and German nobility at that. 

Kunhang can’t really pick apart the Asian in him anyhow, because Yangyang breathes and moves and thinks like a German. Like a Nazi.

“My people are Manchurian.” Kunhang answers with gritted teeth. 

“Mmm. So you’re a patriot now? Would do anything for your country? Half my officers think I keep you because you’re pretty. What do you think about that?” Yangyang’s gaze is slow and purposeful when it slides to his. 

Kunhang’s cheeks flush at the implication. He looks down at his shoes, appreciating the Art Deco interior design present all about the room - moonlight grey geometric tessellations painted into the deep green marble floor. 

“Embarrassed, are we?”

“Maybe they should spend more time actually catching Resistance members and films, if they have that much time to make up stories.” 

Yangyang smiles, showing his teeth. “Oh don’t worry, they already are. If they could get their hands on you, they would too. They’re just itching for me to throw you out.”

Kunhang is growing sick of his taunting. “So why haven’t you? Seems like I won’t be useful to you for very long, if the Resistance already suspects me.”

Yangyang moves before his brain can properly process the speed. A flash of a hand and he’s falling rather unceremoniously on top of him, coughing out a grunt as he lands sprawled over Yangyang’s lap. 

His back hits the mattress, and in a blink of an eye, Yangyang is straddling him, shirt riding up above his thighs, hands fisted into the folds of Kunhang’s padded jacket. 

“What the fuck -” he sputters. 

He only grins, using the time needed for Kunhang to regain his bearings to unzip his jacket, pushing until it bunches at his shoulders. Cool fingers wind around Kunhang’s neck, and Yangyang leans in, his forehead pressed gently against Kunhang’s rain-matted fringe.

“Only cowards would kill someone like you. But I know how to use people like you. No, Kunhang, you’re more useful than you know.” 

Kunhang blubbers, uncomprehending. 

“He would have killed you. Your contact from last week. Inherited those initials that you guard so preciously like a lifeline that’s burning at both ends. Your Resistance is useless here. Fragmented. And I had to come to your rescue, _again_. So now you will tell me what I want to know.”

Kunhang pushes against his chest, hard, the need for distance dizzying. So _that_ was why his contact had been a no-show. He’d gotten a lot of flak from Renjun for that. 

“That’s not how it works. I helped you the last time because it was either that or be tortured by the Yakuza. It had _nothing_ to do with you.”

“But isn’t that how we’ve been working? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” 

Kunhang turns his head away. Three times now, that this Nazi pig has pulled him out of death’s line of sight. 

“Blood for blood. Your heart beats for another day. I get one day closer to wiping out the Resistance here,” Yangyang murmurs, the back of his hand brushing along his eyes, nose, cheek, lips. 

Kunhang breathes in deeply, squeezing his eyes shut. He tells himself that Yangyang is just like the rest of them - only here for a fabricated freedom laced with moonshine and sex. 

But was he, really?

This city might be matted in grey, but Yangyang glitters just as golden as that very first day, when they’d crossed guns in the city square in Liaoning. When he’d thought he was the same as him - a Chinese soldier fighting for any small kind of liberty. 

And then he’d shoved Kunhang against the jeep, firing off a round of intentionally misfired shots in his direction, and then that perfect German accent had spun off his tongue when he’d given the command to give chase in the alley, away from Kunhang. 

His body is all taut with power and the hard lines of a soldier. Those eyes the same dark liquid gold as when he’d motioned for Kunhang to lie still, bending over him to cover the giant heaves of breath he was taking as Kunhang had fought to process the fact that that there was a Nazi soldier leaning over him, _protecting_ him. 

Sweetness on his breath, fresh and tangy as lemons and strawberries beneath the harsh musk of whiskey and tobacco. 

Kunhang does want to taste. 

Yangyang holds himself still, irritatingly knowing of the conflict churning inside Kunhang. He’s waiting, not unlike a predator and its prey. 

No turning back, after this. Kunhang knows that pitted against his own desire, he’s a losing mess. He’s always been on the losing side, after all. And they both know it. It hurts so fucking much, that they’d ended up on opposite sides of this godforsaken war. 

He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, watching Yangyang follow the movement. And then Yangyang is crashing their mouths together. Or maybe Kunhang leans in and meets him halfway. It doesn’t really matter. The kisses are deep and feverish, and Kunhang dips his tongue in for more, wanting to taste the lingering woody hints of the whiskey, the cigar he’d smoked when he’d woken up, last week’s kill, anything. _Everything_. 

Yangyang’s eyes are open at half-mast, hands still threaded loosely into his damp hair, mouth parted, deliciously sinful. He licks at Kunhang’s lips, rolling his hips against Kunhang’s experimentally. 

Only an undergarment worn beneath the shirt, the layers both so thin that Kunhang can feel everything. He chokes into his mouth. 

Sweat and haze and blood and pleasure. 

“Pretty, so pretty.” Yangyang presses those words to his swollen lips. 

Kunhang feels he’s seconds away from giving himself up fully to him; he aches to chase the heat to the end. 

But his head wins out, and he pushes at his chest. 

“You should have killed me.” He says throatily. 

Yangyang pulls away, eyes revealing a wrench of pain before he’s back behind his stony mask. “I decide that, not you.” He nips at his lip like a physical reminder. 

Kunhang sighs but lets it fade. 

Yangyang tugs at the hairs above his nape. “I want an answer. Why were you meeting him? My gut tells me that it has nothing to do with the new film you just told me about, so don’t try to lie.”

Patriotism was a double-edged sword at best - a fleeting concept. And Kunhang is coming to realise that he is loyal only to his heart. And right now, it rests with the boy who sees past his betrayal worn like a fitted cloak of armour, past his lies that roll off smooth as butter on his tongue. 

He blinks his eyes shut, collecting himself. 

“Have you ever watched the films?”

Yangyang scoffs. “Of course not. We don’t ever watch them. It’s for the Führer and the Führer only.”

“Then you don’t know that the films show a different world. A world where _we_ win.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean, another world?” 

“It’s what I just said. In another place, another world, we win. You pigs lose, _Obergruppenführer_.” There’s a tiny noise of delight that chimes inside of him at calling him by his title and insulting him to his face at the same time.

Murder in his eyes, but he restrains himself. “Who told you this?”

He splays his hand over Yangyang’s bare neck, fingers travelling up to the gold chain that twists and glints mid-air, inscribed with the Chinese character of his surname - his mother’s name.

“It’s just a theory, but maybe...”

He grips the chain in his hand. “Just stay still.”

Kunhang wraps an arm around his shoulders, the other hand still gripping the chain tightly. The noise in his quarters peters out into just the sound of their breathing. 

He presses a brave kiss onto Yangyang’s neck. “Think about if there was no war. Or maybe if the Americans had won. Where we might have...” 

He can’t trust himself to continue, but he thinks that Yangyang gets it.

A rip in time, Dejun had told him. Like a great lurch into a parallel world, where longing and dreams didn’t poof into thin air when you woke up. 

White blankets his mind. Fresh air like he’s trodden into a garden. 

He opens his eyes. Streets washed in bursts of sunshine, no trace of war or Occupation ever having smeared this place. Kunhang can tell that they’re standing in the exact same street as the embassy, except this isn’t their street, isn’t their world. 

He looks at Yangyang, brown eyes a radiant gold, a borrowed brightness for just this moment. 

God, if only this was real. 

“This can’t be real,” Yangyang murmurs shakily, even as a glimmer of hope and wonder ripple in his eyes. 

Yangyang looks up. No Nazi flag billowing in the wind atop the building. Upbeat music - illegal - wafting through a faraway speaker. His lip twitches, and he snatches his chain back from Kunhang’s grasp. 

No more sunshine. They’re slammed back into his room, blue sky replaced once more by green-marbled gloom.

“It isn’t real.” He pushes Kunhang coldly off his lap, climbing out of bed to tug on his uniform, tucking his chain where it belongs - buried under mounds of German manufacture. 

“Yangyang -”

“Ring me when you’re sure of the exchange tomorrow. Don’t let yourself get caught. My men have been instructed to kill any Resistance member on sight, and any dog looks the same to them.”

“Yangyang, I -”

Yangyang kisses him, bruisingly hard, and it tastes like finality, like everything that’s better left unsaid.

His heart burns, but it’s icy cold. He wants to put his hands around his throat. Choke the life out of him. He wants to press harder against his mouth, have those eyes look softly on him. 

But he’s kidding himself. In this world he can only ever either be the Resistance’s lackey, the Kempeitai’s punching bag, or the Reich’s dog. 

“Yes, sir.”

He bows lightly, biting his lip to stop the tears from falling. 

When the door closes behind him, he hears a crash against the door, followed by an angry scream. 

The tears fall.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been so obsessed with The Man in the High Castle ever since I started watching the show last month, so this fic challenge came at a very timely, well, time! 
> 
> Some liberties taken from the show, because I couldn't fit in the entire world in under 3k however much I wish I could. Also, let's all assume that the Reich would have allowed a half-German to take on such a high-ranking position. 
> 
> Thank you to the mods for being so endlessly patient with me! You guys are really so great <3
> 
> Come talk (read: scream with me about TMITHC) to me in the comments or on twt after reveals!!


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